Abstract

The question whether there is a natural connection between sound and meaning or if they are related only by convention has
been debated since antiquity. In linguistics, it is usually taken for granted that ‘the linguistic sign is arbitrary,’ and
exceptions like onomatopoeia have been regarded as marginal phenomena. However, it is becoming more and more clear that motivated
relations between sound and meaning are more common and important than has been thought. There is now a large and rapidly
growing literature on subjects as ideophones (or expressives), words that describe how a speaker perceives a situation with
the senses, and phonaesthemes, units like English gl‐, which occur in many words that share a meaning component (in this case ‘light’: gleam, glitter, etc.). Furthermore, psychological experiments have shown that sound symbolism in one language can be understood by speakers
of other languages, suggesting that some kinds of sound symbolism are universal. WIREs Cogn Sci 2017, 8:e1441. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1441

Images

Kammu vowel formants and the size scale for ideophones. To conform with the usual vowel charts, the first formant (F1) is plotted on the y‐axis and the second formant (F2) on the x‐axis.